“... except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A ...”

“... The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away ...”

“... marked a watershed. The independent campaign of the Southern Democrat governor of Alabama, George Wallace, challenged the official Democrat candidate, Hubert Humphrey, and provided a staging post for dissident Southerners between the Democratic Party and a hitherto alien Republicanism. Wallace sang the old song of Southern ...”

“... friendships, settled on the tone he was to take throughout his life. He stayed on to study with William James, Josiah Royce and others in that golden age of American academic philosophising. He distinguished himself in his studies – and, in his attitude towards them, from his teachers. He began to sound a characteristic note of joyous disdain for ordinary ...”

“... composed a short poem for him: ‘Marcel, Marcel, I Love You Like Hell, Marcel.’) She disgusted William Carlos Williams; she terrified Wallace Stevens. She wore cancelled postage stamps on her cheeks as beauty spots, and dressed in outfits one would think Barnes had invented had they not been confirmed by other people’s ...”

“... and curve and tenor’ of the sky is poetry, you’ll like Romer. Certain phrases suggest that Wallace Stevens is the azure sea in which he would like to swim. But he has none of the rigour nor the glassy brilliance of Stevens’s impalpable lexicon. This, from the end of ‘Serenissima’, is typical: I decided my only hope in the universe that day was ...”

“... Mort’ – Doxy, oh! thy glaziers shine   As glimmars by the Salomon! – and that, by William Walsh’s namby-pamby pseudo-pastoral, ‘The Despairing Lover’: Distracted with care For Phillis the fair, Since nothing could move her, Poor Damon the lover ... The three together liven each other up splendidly, and give a real sense of the ...”

“... in Panama with the indigenous people there rather than continue to sail north with the explorer William Dampier, thought the cultivation methods worth reporting: ‘the Indians set them’ – banana trees – ‘in rows or walks, without under-wood; and they make very delightful groves. They cut them down to get at the fruit; and the Bodies being green and ...”

“... He continued to educate himself, through books and journals as well as visits to museums (the Wallace Collection made a strong impression), and the commercial galleries that were becoming so influential. Naturally, he entered the ambit of dealers like Duveen, but he expected favourable prices and generous terms, occasionally dangling the possibility of ...”

“... ambivalence thesis. Did liberal England die with the passing of the Aliens Act? Novels by Edgar Wallace and Violet Guttenberg – The Four Just Men (1905) and A Modern Exodus (1904) – implicitly warned that the Act meant the collapse of the principles that defined the 19th-century liberal state, principles summarised by Glover as ‘civic ...”

“... in the wee hours after drinking at a pub. They also go to predictable and even boring places: Wallace Stevens’s house (he didn’t die there); Emily Dickinson’s homestead (she did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on ...”

“... from his voyage aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns ...”

“... writers when the subject finds himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ever ...”

“... and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster ...”

“... took him to see the film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. Ashbery, who would be captivated by film throughout his life, was transported by the combination of Shakespeare’s language and Mendelssohn’s music. When he arrived back at his grandparents’ house he immediately went upstairs and composed a ...”